Editor’s Note: Randall Balmer is a prize-winning historian and Emmy Award nominee, as well as a professor of American religious history at Barnard College, Columbia University and a visiting professor at Yale Divinity School. His commentaries have appeared in newspapers across the country, including the Des Moines Register, The New York Times and the Philadelphia Inquirer, among others. He is an editor for Christianity Today and author of a dozen books, including Thy Kingdom Come and Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory, which was made into a three-part documentary for PBS. Mr. Balmer, an Episcopal priest, lives in rural Connecticut with his wife, Catharine Randall, a professor of French at Fordham University.

I remember the eyes as though it were yesterday. They were pretty. Blue. Expectant, yet afraid. "That’s Diane," one of my new fourth-grade classmates said, pointing in her direction. "Don’t let her touch you. She’s the Cootie Girl."

There was, I could tell, something different about Diane. My family was hardly affluent, nor were the kids at Wenona School. But the dress Diane wore was tattered. Someone whispered that she and her mother lived alone. At lunchtime, she ate by herself. Although she had a pleasant smile, she looked slightly disheveled. Waiflike.

Like a pack of wolves taunting a moose, children can devise ingenious ways to belittle anyone they choose to ostracize. I recall one day standing in a line across the hallway from a janitor’s closet. One of my classmates had apparently been musing on the word "custodian" painted on the door. "Hey, look," he shouted. "CUS-TO-DIAN."

Everyone chortled at the brilliance of the put-down, of course, but I caught the wounded look in Diane’s eyes. Yet another insult, yet another scar to carry home that night. "Where do you stand?" the eyes asked. Would the new kid become just another tormenter, or maybe — hoping against hope — a friend?

I wish I could tell you that I did the right thing back there in the hallway. We all like to be the heroes of our own stories. But I’m afraid that I’m not very good at this hero business. It takes guts to stand up to peers, to resist the pressures of conformity, and I have come to admire those with the courage to take up the cause of those less fortunate, those on the margins. Sojourner Truth. Angelina Grimke. Jane Addams.

"Each time a man stands up for an ideal or acts to improve the lot of others, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope," said Robert Kennedy. "Crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current that can sweep down the mightiest wall of oppression and resistance."

I don’t pretend that history would have been different if I had been kind to Diane, the Cootie Girl, back in Michigan more than four decades ago. But I would have been different. And perhaps she as well, if only for a moment. I was naked, and you clothed me. I was beaten and slumped over a barbed-wire fence on a cold Wyoming night; you wrapped me in a blanket and tried to revive me. I was sad and lonely, and I was wearing a ratty dress because my mother couldn’t afford anything better. But you stood up to the crowd and became my friend.

Would that it were so.